Monday, November 12, 2012

Decimal Activity

Happy Veteran's Day! We have the day off, and I've used my long weekend to recover from a cold. I had to use my first sick day this year on Friday, but I'm glad I did because Friday was the worst day of it and I was able to just sit in the bath tub and watch TV all day. Hehe, but some good news came to me Thursday night. I applied for Teach For America and was notified that I was invited to a final interview! I was just hoping to have a phone interview, but to find out that I can skip that step was so nice! So I have a final interview in December and will know the first week of January if I'm accepted. It would be really nice to know where I'm going by January- we'll just have to wait and see.

Eeeeeek! haha

Now that I'm starting to feel better, I thought I'd share a little activity I did with my kids last week. We're learning about decimals and they're expected to know through the thousandths place and how to pronounce them properly (which is something I have to be careful about, myself!) They really like using their dry-erase markers on white boards, so we came up with this:

So simple, but so much potential

Did you know you could put any worksheet in one of those protective sleeves and kids can write on them using dry-erase markers?! This changes everything. We did some practice like "Write the number one and three tenths" or "Write a number with a '4' in the hundredths place", etc.

Then we did a fun activity where everyone writes a number on their sheet, then passes it to their right. The next step is to write the number in word form, then pass to the right. The next step is to write in expanded form, then pass to the right. The fourth person has to check that everything is correct. Then you start over!

I have such great handwriting

You can mix this up in a bunch of ways. Sometimes we had the fourth step be "write an equivalent decimal", sometimes we made them stop at hundredths, sometimes they could go through thousandths. You could do this with normal place value, too! So many options. And when they're done, just erase!

Maaaaaaagic

I'm definitely going to be using these protective sheets for more activities. Hope you are enjoying your Veteran's Day weekend. We have four days this week and then two days next week before Thanksgiving break. Time is absolutely FLYING by!